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Alan Cox Interview
Nathan Chantrell writes "I haven't seen this yet on Slashdot:
A brief interview with Alan Cox where he talks about
he started hacking the Linux kernel".
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emplay racist ppl...
I guess this is the PR where the look is better than the inside (code)...
and then they wander why Linux is so stable and successfull..
cant wait when they go down...
Slash dot should cull obvious flame bait that has
no value but soak up bandwidth.
1. you must pay the price
sleepless nights? => been there...
having PHBs? => have one
hardware? => yes expensive..
2. there ain't no free lunch
was there ever?
3. experience helps
aint it obvious? it ALWAYS helps..
----
I took co-op (type of school endorsed voluntary work) at local programming company, and they took me on spot... Now I am to teach them Linux as they were Windows only shop and want to switch..
Hmmmm...
Hey - WTF is with those non-clickable links?
um, no, look at the html to the page, they make the text color blue and underline it for the fake links
Hey, Genius. Have a look at the HTML in the page.
The original poster knew exactly what they were talking about but instead you post a pointless (and incorrect) comment about (I assume) the superiority of Linux.
I'll work for just about anyone.... if they offer me enough money. :)
He runs a consulting company called Building Number Three (http://roadrunner.swansea.linux.org.uk/). He has a contract with Red Hat.
What a sweet job.
Here come the college kids and opt-outs to flame you to dust. Frankly, though, when I see a catastrophic grooming catastrophe like this, my first thought is "engineer with plate in skull," and I've had some unenlightening run-ins with that ilk.
I'd take a job as a hitman if someone offered me one.... (and it paid at least $150K per year - I currently make $120K as a sysadmin)
Your comment reflects a lot more on you than it does on Alan Cox. Where I come from, the people who refer to others as `White Trash' are:
1. White Trash themselves, trying to feel superior.
2. Nouveau Riche, trying to hide their lack of genteel upbringing by disparaging everyone else.
True gentlemen (and women) have no use for such terms.
You gotta wonder.
Alan is great, but there are lots of others:
Ted, Ingo, Steephen, Bill Hawes (where's he now?),
Davem and others. But Linus is the greatest.
Lurk on the kernel-list for a few years and you'll
see.
Microsoft thinks he is productive enough to make him an
unsolicited job offer.
Ok, perhaps hes being a little condecending (sp?) but you've got to admit that hes right. This guy is calling _Alan Cox_ white trash? He doesnt have a clue.
The original poster doesnt have a clue, I mean.
In this context, "run-in" means they walk in off the street and badger the hell out of people trying to do their jobs. My favorite was "Crazy Bob," who wanted to reverse-engineer Phong shading and pipe it through his real-time 3D hardware (think John Big-Bootay in the psycho ward) to produce true-3d output at twice the resolution with no loss in information. See also "rotary acceleration -> linear acceleration," which is also steel plate territory. Dredge ten thousand stinky, scary-looking indigents to find one Alan Cox, and you're way behind schedule, but hey! someone has to win the lottery, right?
Not answering your question directly.
I have personally met the guy and I have to say
that this guy shocked me like nobody else has
ever. He has such severe attitude problems, its
unbelievable. I am not surprised that Linus could
not work with him. Alan on the other hand is
exactly the opposite.
What are you responding to?
The original post was
The next post was :And you respond with comments about:
Here's an idea: next time, wait until someone makes a point about Microsoft before injecting your memes into the mix. This technique is much more effective in inducing group-think.
That's not trashy, that's just being out of fashion. What's wrong with sitting in the pub drinking beer until you barf, even whilst wearing holey socks ?
Now, if you wanna see some real white trash, get yourself down to Alabama. It's not the same thing at all as English yobs (who are just ordinary people who happen to be assholes). They have a different league of genetic trash. There are some wonderful people in Alabama, but they sure do have their share of certified, grade A, "nigger"-hating, ugly, inbred garbage.
erm... i doubt hitmen work on annual salaries...
;)
also, you're almost there man... $120K for torturing people, rather that $150 for actually _killing_ them... that ain't so bad.
This is a stupid thread.
AndyM
The 'attitude that isn't really conducive to organized production' is in your head. You either do the work or you don't. You can slack off on a regular 9-5 job as easily as you can if you work other hours.
:) Just my opinion of course.
I admit, manager-types aren't too keen on employees working alternate hours to the usual 9-5, we have a few engineers/MIS people who come in at say 10am, or 11am... managers 'put up with it' because they know that these people are actually doing their work, but they're not exactly happy about it.
Alan Cox is a special case: He works from home AFAIK thus not sitting in a room of developers, _wants_ to do this stuff, and is great at it, so he will do the work. A little out of the ordinary, but hey, it's worked so far
AndyM
Please, anyone who knows follow up on this one.
He was going to put together a whole linux distribution -- Linux Pro if I remember right.
I also remember him saying that he had read-write BSD filesystem ready and was just putting the final bug fixing together before release. It was over three years before rw BSD finally got implemented (by someone else).
Ken
"I don't care what you think about me and ubsequently don't care about anything you think."
I wonder what's the spirit of Bill Gates, go figure.
If Alan Cox offered you a job, what would
be your words of reply?
do what ever you feel like.. not watched by PHBs... Having long beard... Having multiple PCs and Hacking Linux...
:P
most of it has come true now... got multiple pcs.. networked.. got a beard.. learning multiple langs..
I still need few months to catchup on C and so on.. but heck... I am just 19...
BTW: and I also like #7... 'they did..I said no'
Seriously, Alan is King!
What RedHat pays him isn't enough. This guy should receive
one of those genius grants. Linus has non-Linux job so Alan's
contributions have far exceeded anyone else.
Once the work begins on the next development kernel will
Alan be able to wok on both 2.2.x and 2.x?
Perhaps the maintenance plan for 2.x needs to be re-instated so
that guys like Alan can spend more time doing high quality development.
I happen to like merging, maintaining and working
on all sorts of little cleanups and bits of code.
Alan
isn't really conducive to organized production (a-la corporate workplace, irregardless of what you may think of that).
another thing that tends to hinder the "corporate workplace", is when doze guys don't speak so great.
yes
no
- jk
(anal enough for ya?)
yeah it is..its an old sparcstation...the things run hot as hell and are slower than a 486 (: but if you're testing alpha code..i guess its better than nothing (hm..lets guess how an alpha chip will run this code..heh)
-xyster
Well, MS employees have the stereotype of wearing black shirts and slacks and looking extremely "neat". So turning up their noses at people who look like Alan would probably follow..
what the hell... I thought Linux was supposed to be stable !@$)!(@&$!@$! I was doing something important and I just assumed that since I was in Linux I would be safe... but it crashed! I couldn't even telnet in... what's going on? I'm tempted to reinstall 2.0.36 right now.
I never had Linux crash on me in the 2 years I've been using it, so I kinda blew up when that happened. I have a Dell XPS H266 running at 266, it's been very reliable, it has 128 megs of RAM, I'm running a newly installed copy of Red Hat 5.2 with X version 3.3.2 and the Millenium II driver that came with it. I didn't really expect help, I just thought Linux was never supposed to crash on a normal computer like mine. I was running Netscape 4.08 alone with a couple of other things, but everything was run as a user, not root.. I didn't think anything was supposed to be able to bring down everything including the network. The only things I've changed lately are installing KDE pre2 and kernel 2.2.1, but KDE was run as a user..
:)
.sig
Would make a great
Nonsense. The market simply would have been controlled by others. With Apple, IBM and plenty of others in the fray and the amount of money up to be made, someone else would have done the job.
Tell me... how would computers be more expensive if OS/2 or Desqview had made it big? For that matter, can the recent availability of free OSes do anything but make end-user costs even less?
I don't remember them giving away Windows. Licencing it to retailers, sure. Giving it away? Umm... nope.
Anyhow... are you saying that if OS/2 claimed to work with 2MB of RAM (though it wouldn't REALLY be useful without 8), it would have been a better thing? That's pretty much what MS did with Windows. Those IBMers -- too honest for the users' good! Uh-huh.
I enjoy watching Andrea Arcangeli progress while working on shared memory and memory swap routines, and memory maps.
The poor guy is going to the university and writing code probably 20 hours a day. He needs sleep. Linus tells him to "go away" but Andrea comes back with new ideas and more code:>)
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Sister came to visit, arriving in evening, bearing gifts from a recent American visit. Sister gave Alan a catapult (note to Americans and Australians: you call this a slingshot: a Y-shaped piece of wood with elastic or rubber band which is used to propel objects at great speed). Sister and Alan tested whether it was true that penguins don't fly.
d iary.html
Penguins fly.
http://roadrunner.swansea.linux.org.uk/~hobbit/
Have you read my journal today?
8-9 hours a day hacking away? I'm all for dedication to a cause, but how does the guy get money to eat?
What industry do you think this guy works in, marketing? Christ, he's a kernel hacker, not an account exec... hell, half of my days I dont even put on anything but boxers and sunglasses and I cant even compare myself to the likes of Alan Cox.
:) His wife seems very cool with it all, btw.
You probably think everyone around here looks like the main characters in movies like The Net and Hackers.
Not that Im not beautiful, but christ, who needs to shave when you dont leave the house for days on end?
Go natty dread geeks!
Red Hat hires him.
Incidentally, though being British means I've never actually encountered any "white trash", don't they normally look more like Kenny's parents than Alax Cox?
fish and pipes
I was wondering the same thing. They go out of their way to make it look ilke it's a real link, but don't bother to actually make it a real link. What the hell? Fucking annoying.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Honestly, that sort of appearance impresses me. I read it as expressing "I am; and no, I don't care what you think about it" and get the impression these people know what their stuff.
I think it was the small Taiwanese companies hiring 20 year old girls to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, 51 weeks a year for only a couple of hundred US dollars a month who were and remain responsible for the cheap hardware we all enjoy. Certainly, Microsoft had NOTHING to do with it.
An American in Taipei
Let them grow beards, let them be free!
But you have to admit that it's an attitude that isn't really conducive to organized production (a-la corporate workplace, irregardless of what you may think of that). "Oh, you know. Just come in whenever and work on something that holds your interest," isn't something you get to hear until you've spent many, many years in the industry.
It's a diagram of the CPUs in the shot.
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
..blab incoherently with a fist up your ass?
impressive..
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
I cant help but wonder..... is that a Sun IPC/IPX on the far left in the top picture? Sure looks like one to me, especially in conjunction with the keyboard next to it which appears to be a type 5.....
Oh well, thats my random curiosity for ya....
I've always kinda wondered this. I got into linux right around the time that they were talking about two different network packages, so it was a big deal at the time, but then I forgot about it.
(This was Net-3 right?)
Can anybody point me to some details?
The scary thing is that they used a font tag to make the url's blue when they could have just a-href'd them instead...hehe
btw - you don't have to reboot, you just have to close all netscape windows and then kill a stray netscape task that seems to get loose every once and while.
"It's Brazilian"
Let us not criticize the facial appearance, but let us criticize the code. If you don't like the appearance of Alan Cox, then please seek your revenge by writing better code than he does. (I have not examine code written by him recently, so I am not making a statement of the quality or lack thereof of his code.)
Cheers,
Joshua.
I need ritual cleansing. I spent the evening hooking up my brother's Thinkpad to the LAN here, and had to download all this Windows garbage. Have you ever installed Windows 95 Service Pack 1? <screams> As soon as I post this article, I'm going to go boot Zipslack. Anything is better than this Windows 95 prison.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
The interview was just a little bit inaccurate about the details..
If I remember correctly Fred did release something
that actually went in (replacing Ross' code), however
he then continued to work on new releases without
showing anybody the new code (very much Cathedral with
himself as the only one in there). Alan fixed and maintained
the already released code, and in the end everybody got
fed up of waiting for the new stuff to come out of
the Cathedral and Alan's version stayed in for good.
You can find Fred's copyrights in the code.
I would bet that you work for MicroSoft.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
Since when did white trash learn to use computers? Stop buying electronics and buy a razor.